Dark Hollow Haunted Forest
A friend of mine and I have this annual Halloween tradition of going to a haunted house or walk every October, a tradition predicated on our feelings of fear. My friend said she has spent so much of her life protecting herself from the path of terror and experiencing that immediate feeling of fear. What better way to acknowledge your fears than to go to a cheesy haunted house? I must admit in the two times I have accompanied her to the haunted activity I lost my mind both times over a noisy, revved up chainsaw. Scary clowns, dead children, and insane asylums are fine. Chainsaws send me over the edge.
This year marks the third of a ritual of visiting a haunted evening in the Seattle area. I think I have found the perfect place to go: Dark Hollow Haunted Forest. This is one of the first sites I picked from a list of haunted activities in the Seattle area, but as I dug deeper into the site I found the most terrific idea spurring ideas about archives and special collections.
Underneath the main entry page there is a link to The Legend, which takes the user to the personal desk of Professor Helsbane. The sound of quiet thunder and gently falling rain can be heard in the background, giving way to a crackling recording of a vocal harmony from the 1920s. At the bottom of the image with softened edges blurring into darkness are the instructions: “Click on items on Professor Helsbane’s desk to reveal secrets.”
Hovering my cursor over the desk I click on the woman’s portrait tucked behind the open book and leaning up against an antique typewriter. The window pops up with the woman’s portrait and handwritten in elegant script across the bottom: “My beloved Abigail, RPP.” Subsequent clicks around the online image reveal: a group of men in period attire posing for a portrait in a studio, Mason Lodge 1875; a document still clamped in the typewriter written to the Washington State Paranormal Society; a photograph of a person wearing a tribal mask with a description scrawled across the bottom corresponding to this same artifact propped upright in front of a small collection of books; various clippings, photographs, maps, notes, and other ephemera from the desk of Professor Helsbane. Frozen in time the entire desk has been preserved as though Helsbane stepped out for a moment.
What does this mean to me as an archives and library information professional? It means more than you can imagine. This popular site is attempting to capture the life of an individual through historical fragments, albeit to bring about a sense of creepiness and fear. Historical materials are brought together, a context is recreated, and through user mediated hypermedia we discover a sense of the life that surfaced these seeminlgy disparate materials.
Imagine if an archives/special collections did just what they are doing here with their online representation of collections. No one can precisely recreate a historical moment; however, a metaphorical recreation of the historical context of a collection could raise awareness of the digital surrogates of unique, personal items. A contextual virtual environment could be a highly visual, interactive gateway to either a personal, family, or organizational collection. Different formats of materials could be explored, where the user may not immediately realize the depth and scope of a collection. The range of materials would become more immediate and manipulable in a virtual environment and showcase the range of digital surrogates and services available to the user. I’m guessing that this would involve a lot of work to put something like this together and I understand most users of archives and special collections materials are comfortable with their inventories, finding aids, and administrative data, but users are changing and archives and special collections units need to make every effort possible to bring them in from the gently falling rain.
I believe this Dark Hollow Haunted Forest website raises some innovative ideas about bridging the gap between users and archival information, and creates an environment reuniting the materials with their context (if only metaphorically).
